To mix my metaphors, RTs increase the noise part of the signal to noise ratio in what can already be a rather noisy echo chamber. They make me want to read/use Twitter less.

There is an alternative to this madness!

Twitter has a Favorites feature. Like a tweet? Mark it as a favorite. Here are mine.

You can get your favorites (or someone elses) in a JSON or RSS format, and do something interesting with them. Add them to your life stream, tumblog, FriendFeed, etc.1 This gives people an option to subscribe to that data, without cluttering your Twitter stream with the constant squawking of a parrot.

I follow you on Twitter because I’m interested in what you have to say. The more your Twitter stream is polluted by RTs, the less likely I am to keep following you.

Yes, it would be cool to be able to get your friend’s Favorites in your update stream – I hope Twitter adds an option for this on a per user basis. [back]

I think an occassional RT is ok, but I agree, chronic RT’ers are no better than spam. I stopped following Tim O’Reilly for that exact reason. 99 out of 100 tweets of his, was just an RT. If I cared what those people said, i’d follow them. I wanted to hear what Tim had to say.

I follow (and am followed by) more than 1200 people on Twitter. RTs are such an insignificant issue even with that many people that I rarely even think about them. And they’re never a nuisance. Alex, on the other hand, you only follow 100 people. I can’t for the life of me think why retweets would pose such a problem that the issue would require its own post.

But, to each his own. You don’t like retweets. Fine. Your prerogative. But, your suggestion that Twitter add follower favorites into your tweet stream fully undoes the proposed alternative to retweets. You would be getting the very same (if not far more) noise you’re trying to filter out.

Yeah, it’s a little bit annoying when you receive 5 or 6 retweets of a post by say, Kevin Rose, all of them saying “RT @kevinrose Checkout the new features at Digg!” or something along those lines.
I use via if I want to repost something, and usually after the link and description.

…twitchy trigger finger.
But this method looks like a much better method, probably something that can easily be implemented into any App even now via the rss/json. +1 that Twitter should offer it directly into the stream.

You would be getting the very same (if not far more) noise you’re trying to filter out.

Not at all. I’d get to choose which people’s Favorites I follow, and an item could appear just once as the Favs are pointers back to the original item. I can see 3 RTs by 3 different people of the same damn thing.

I can’t agree. Smart retweeting makes some people more worth following, especially if they add commentary & perspective. Also, many twitter clients do offer filtering, so if you really wanted to, you could filter out RT.

I can’t help but find it amusing that the same thing people complained about early in blogging days (“too much link posting! Not enough original content!”) is now being heard in the arena of mini-blogging. Same choices apply, follow or not, and for better or worse, I doubt this will be the last stylistic issue the mini blogging world argues about.

I’m still on the fence about RTs. The concept was to help grow followers but only the “popular” Twitterers seem to be retweeted.

On the other hand, the most off-putting thing I see is constant begging for diggs and floats. Like Alex, if I like what you have to say, I might digg or float it; might even retweat it. But if you blatantly ASK ME, it’s nearly a given that I won’t.

Nice to see another perspective on things. (And happily using your Tweet Tools on all web sites!)

Overuse of retweets exacerbates the increasing problem of original tweets being buried beneath a sea of background noise and nonsense. There needs to be a way to show that you agree with the sentiment of a particular Tweet: but, just link to it or use via, like the considerate web content publisher you are…

Retweeting is akin to copy and pasting! And if you copy and paste other peoples’ stuff you probably have nothing worthwhile to say anyway!

Long-time reader and fan here. I’ve been thinking a lot about Twitter spam lately. I have people that I have wholeheartedly respected and talked to turn on Twitter and just become either Ghost writers or Spam RT bots.

That gets old hella quick. This has led me to thinking about different reasons why I follow people in the first place and, in turn, why they would follow me.

For me, the biggest problem with the RT vs via syntax is that when people simply *forward* a Tweet using the “via” syntax without further modification, it ends up being *more* confusing since it sounds like it’s coming from the forwarded, rather than the originator.

Somebody who is going to take the time to add context will hopefully also take the time to change the syntax to match that (ie, add their own “via” at the end). Somebody who blindly forwards from a client that uses a “via” tag creates *more* signal-to-noise since the re-tweet is not not obvious.

In terms of the philosophical debate about re-tweeting, I think the reality is that if somebody is cluttering up your feed with RT’s, then simply stop following them. The whole magic of Twitter is that it’s a completely open follower model… There are inane jerks with non-original ideas in the real world, so there are going to be the same people on Twitter. If it annoys you, then why are these people on your list of followers?

I personally use RT sparingly, but it’s a great way to pass on community-type announcements for those of us with smaller circles of followers and even occasionally share a humorous quote here and there. With only 140 characters to play with, most tweets speak for themselves and don’t need any more context, and even then it’s hard to add it.